02.23.16

Excerpt: Exhibition

Stools That Channel Our Favorite Modernist Sculptors

Isamu Noguchi, Hanna Eshel, Barbara Hepworth — these are the masters of marble who came to mind when we first saw French designer Guillaume Delvigne's beautiful new stool series for Tools Galerie in Paris. The young designer — who often does work for companies like Hermes or La Chance — just closed an exhibition there, the inaugural presentation at a brand-new Left Bank space for the gallery. The sculptural, totemic stools — which were inspired by mooring posts — are actually made from several different materials, including bronze, wood, and leather. But stone is the star here, in creamy white Carrera, flecked travertine, and a rich green called Vert Donay.

More

02.22.16

Excerpt: Book

A New Book Features the Botanical Decor of Your Dreams

File this one under "why didn't we think of it first?" This fall, Magali Elali and Bart Kiggen of the Belgian online magazine Coffeeklatch — a destination for lovely interviews and photography that's been on our must-read list for years — released a book called Greenterior, which looks at the homes of designers and artists through the lens of their abundant houseplants.

More

02.20.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 15, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Unexpected collabs (Issey Miyake x Ittala, La Perla x Walter Terruso), surprise mug subscriptions (Helen Levi, Ben Medansky), and a striking Amsterdam store interior by Framework (pictured).

More

02.19.16

Shopping

These Mirrors Will Make You Question the Meaning of Humanity

Chen Chen and Kai Williams's new Mirror Masks for Areaware are clearly just flat slabs of industrially produced glass printed with a few simple shapes. And yet somehow they ooze emotion — that's how strongly our brains are wired to read the feelings that lie behind facial expressions. To underscore that dichotomy, Areaware's art director Elsa Brown hired the up-and-coming Brooklyn artist Carson Fisk-Vittori to take the mirrors to Mexico City, then shoot evocative photographs of them in various settings around town.

More

02.18.16

Studio Visit

Dutch Design Studio Os ∆ Oos Makes Work That’s Brainy But Beautiful

Four years ago, Sight Unseen featured the first product by what was then a brand-new studio on the scene: The Syzygy series by Dutch duo Os ∆ Oos consisted of three lamps whose intensity depended on the subtle rotation of three light-filtering discs placed in front of the bulb; it was inspired by the astronomical phenomenon of three celestial bodies aligning in space. As a design product, it was both conceptually driven and artistically minded, but it was, at the end of the day, a lamp. “We’re definitely not artists; we’re designers,” clarifies Oskar Peet, who with Sophie Mensen makes up the Eindhoven-based studio. “We like to make functional projects.”

More

06.18.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Platform at Almine Rech Gallery

File under so simple it’s genius: This month, the Brussels gallery Almine Rech launched an exhibition, curated by Parisian art critic Nicolas Trembley, that mostly repurposes work from the gallery’s own collection. Called Platform, its primary conceit is a single, 55-foot-long white plinth running the length of the exhibition space, where all of the works on view joust for space, including Gavin Turk’s vinyl-painted Turkey Foil Box, Alex Israel’s marble and Styrofoam fro-yo cup, Andy Warhol’s Brillo box, Ettore Sottsass’s Casablanca bookshelf, and an array of Steuler vases we’re guessing might have come from Trembley’s own collection. Besides highlighting the three-dimensional aspect of the pieces — and making viewers reconsider items they might have passed over if displayed alone — Platform also “establishes a dialogue between the notions of design and contemporary art, objects of consumption, mass culture and subjects of contemplation” and asks the question: “What is an art object and what is the place of the object in art?” We’ve excerpted a few of our favorite images here.

More

02.17.16

Sight Unseen OFFSITE

Join Our 2016 New York Design Week Show

Each May, Sight Unseen produces and curates one of the biggest, most important fairs held during New York Design Week: Sight Unseen OFFSITE. This year we're stepping things up a major notch, with double the exhibition space — inside the historic W.R. Grace building — and an even more ambitious curatorial program, presented in partnership with Ford. The show runs from May 13–16, and our exhibitor application process is now open.

More

02.16.16

Fair Report

15 Things We Loved At Stockholm Design Week 2016

While we would have happily braved the cold and darkness of Stockholm Design Week just to eat Kalles Kaviar for breakfast, snag some Acne staples at a cut rate, and do a self-guided tour of the key spots featured in Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle books, it's also one of our favorite design fairs, not least because the Scandi scene is so hyper-relevant right now. These 15 Stockholm Design Week highlights are must-sees.

More

02.14.16

Saturday Selects

Week of February 8, 2016

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: Still haven't found a Valentine's gift? How about a $7,000 trio of architectural weavings, a spiral gold ring, an avant-garde flower arrangement, or just a day date uptown to see the latest California Light & Space exhibit (above)? We've got you covered, ahead.

More

02.12.16

Sighted

These Avant-Garde Arrangements Look So Right in Ben Medansky’s Vases

It's no secret that ceramics and plants are two of the biggest styling trends driving the interiors world right now, but our favorite thing is what happens when the two collide: The planting of jaw-dropping specimens in purpose-built pots has become something of a trend itself lately, from Adam Silverman and Kohei Oda's eccentric potted cacti to David Haskell's psychotic plants to Bari Ziperstein's recent ikebana collaboration with Junzo Mori. The latest entrant to that field is Ben Medansky, who partnered with the Los Angeles creative agency We Came In Peace on a series of limited-edition living works, on sale through Monday at Persephone's, a Valentine's-themed botanical pop-up shop in Hollywood.

More

02.11.16

Sighted

Pro Tip: Designy Furniture That’s Hiding in Plain Sight

Two weeks ago, I happened to find myself on the Roche Bobois website, and I had a minor retail epiphany: Not only does the French furniture brand boast some pretty legit, on-trend offerings by designers like Cédric Ragot, Stephen Burks, and even Ettore Sottsass, it has showrooms everywhere — from Scottsdale to Dallas to Denver to Detroit, and that's just in America — meaning that cutting-edge, designy furniture may actually be closer at hand in the U.S. than we realized.

More

02.10.16

Studio Visit

Playing Around With the Cool Kids of American Design

Inside the experimental playground that is Ladies & Gentlemen's new Brooklyn studio: “All of our work is an evolution of itself,” says Dylan Davis, one-half of the up-and-coming design couple. Shapes on a piece of jewelry might lead to a geometric take on lighting; that, in turn, might inspire the assorted forms suspended on a mobile. However distinct, each piece is unmistakably linked to the next, joined by an understated elegance and what the two refer to as "playful austerity." “We try to embrace that feeling you had as a kid when you got to really explore,” Davis says. “Our goal is to take that spirit of play and figure out how to use it professionally.”

More

02.09.16

Interiors

A Brooklyn Home by the Duo Behind New York’s Coolest Design Shop

Coming Soon is the design shop most cities only wish they had. The downtown New York boutique, founded by former art gallerists Fabiana Faria and Helena Barquet, opened in 2013 in an area that's since become a nexus of cool, thanks to neighbors like Dimes, Project no 8, Mission Chinese, and Fung Tu. The plant-filled shop hosts occasional exhibitions and carries a pitch-perfect mix of vintage finds and design's most-wanted giftables, and it does so in a space that's constantly changing but somehow always exactly what you need. What we didn't know when we first met Barquet and Faria is that the two have an ad-hoc, not-quite-professional interior design business on the side.

More